We recently received a call from a customer asking if there was any chance of recovering data from an old IBM IDE laptop hard drive that he had stored away. He mentioned that many years ago he had sent it to a data recovery company, who had no success in overcoming the problem, so he had it returned back to him, hoping that in the future technology may change.

As we offer a free diagnosis, I told him that we can determine if there is any chance of recovery at no initial cost. So with nothing to lose the customer sent the hard drive to us.

The hard drive was a IBM IC25N040ATMR040 laptop drive with the old IDE 44 pin interface. Upon inspection we found that the drive had suffered liquid damage on the PCB and also possibly effecting the internal electronics. We proceeded to carry out the rework necessary to overcome the problem, resulting in a successful recovery for the customer.

IC25N040ATMR04 Data Recovery

So anyone out there holding onto an old hard drive that had previously been diagnosed as unrecoverable, bear in mind that with modern technology and expertise your previous lost data may be recoverable.

Case Study

Drive: WD3200AAJS-40RYA0Problem: Clicking. Diagnosed by multiple third parties as unrecoverable.

This hard drive has travelled the globe and had been looked at by various data recovery companies, eventually landing on the desk of our data recovery partner in Amsterdam. Our partner then asked us if we were up for a challenge and explained to us that the last data recovery company to look at the drive in Portugal had given up with no success.

Third Party Feedback

We got in contact with the company in Portugal and they explained to us that they had tried mechanical and firmware repair, but both did not overcome the problem.

Booking In

Once the drive was booked into our process, it was clear that the warranty seals had been removed and the top cover had been previously opened. Therefore we needed to take the hard drive straight into our clean room to check for any media damage and also to confirm that the mechanics of the drive had been rebuilt correctly.

Findings

We found no cause for concern in the clean room examination. The drive appeared to be clean and was correctly rebuilt. We replaced the internal heads with a new set as a matter of course and rebuilt the drive and then moved to the next stage of our process. The drive was then powered up on our proprietary equipment and an extensive firmware check and fix process was carried out. Perseverance was the key to overcoming the firmware corruption. It was apparent that a lot of the original firmware had been totally overwritten and a lot of painstaking work was done over the next few weeks to rebuild the firmware to eventually allow the drive to come ready.

Imaging

Once it was established that we could access the data area of the drive, it was put into a block level head map imaging process. This allowed us to control the drive and to further stabilise it by imaging each disk surface individually. Once this process was complete a file extraction was carried out on the image to reveal the original folder and file structure.

Result

The image process was a complete success and resulted in over 190GB of data recovered. A folder and file structure list was sent to the customer, who acknowledged saying that all the data had been recovered.

Once again we were able to test ourselves against our competition, all be it in Portugal. In this case the customer was fortunate to seek advice from our data recovery partner in Amsterdam who recommended us. We can’t help but wonder how many people are told that their data is lost for ever, without the thought of getting a second opinion.

Just recently I was able to meet up with one of our European business partners in Holland. The company is based in Amsterdam nd offers a national data recovery service. Although a young company, they already have a strong market presence and are growing all the time. Their English is excellent which is more than I can say for my Dutch. It is always good to put a personal face behind the telephone conversations.

Once again we had an enquiry from a customer who was at her wits end and wanted a second opinion. She had spilt coffee on her laptop that had all her family photographs. She had taken it to PC World where she had originally bought it. They advised her to use their internal recovery process, and sent it off for analysis. She was eventually told that there was no chance of recovering her data from the liquid damaged hard drive. But fortunately for her, against the advice she received, she decided to search online for another data recovery company. This is where we came in. Although the hard drive was covered in sticky coffee and damaged by the liquid, we were able to overcome the problem and recover all of the data for the customer. Once again another happy customer as a result of a second opinion. This is becoming a habit.

When your hard drive has failed, where do you turn for help? In many cases the supplier or manufacturer of your computer or hard drive are not the best place to deal with your data loss. Also your warranty only covers the hardware and not your lost files.

So why choose us at Dataquest ?

With over 15 years of experience we are very familiar with all types of hard drive failures. Unlike many other companies our costs are fixed and based on how quick you wish to have your recovered data returned. Like many other companies we offer a free diagnosis, but unlike many others this does not determine eventual recovery cost but decides wether the hard drives problem is mechanical or not. We use the latest hardware and techniques to produce the best results possible.

On a more personal note customer service is a large part of what we do and understanding customer needs is paramount. We will in many cases go beyond what other companies would deem cost effective when recovering lost data. We use all our acquired knowledge to exhaust all possibilities.

We are also partnered with many IT support companies around the UK, to enable us to connect with customers who would other wise have not known of our services.

PGP WDE is an encryption tool that uses a boot loader installed on an internal hard drive. This utility launches before Windows and prompts the user to input their password. Without the password you cannot gain access to the data.

This utility is widely used by IBM personnel and is now part of IBM’s process that has to be adhered to by end users. Prior to this utility IBM hard drives were restricted access by a low level ATA hard drive password setup by the internal IBM IT department. As computer systems advanced and maybe as a result of a reduced IBM IT department, IBM adopted the user friendly PGP encryption process.

We regulary receive these hard drives from IBM, and we find that the major problem is related to the PGP boot sequence. PGP does not like a hard drive that is suffering from bad sectors, especially within the partition table. It results in the user being unable to load their access code on startup, or in some cases the code is accepted but does not boot correctly due to bad sectors further along.

We have a lot of experience recovering data from PGP whole disk encrypted hard drives and as a result our data recovery process has a very high success rate.

I had an issue in searching for content within Apple Mail. Every time I tried to search for any particular phrase the Mail application crashed and closed instantly. So I decided to Rebuild the Mailboxes. Before doing this I checked that my latest Time Machine backup had carried out successfully. (It had.)

Once confirmed I clicked Rebuild from the Mailbox drop down menu. Instantly all the mail disappeared and I was left wondering whether it was doing anything. I was patient and waited to see what would happen and sure enough after a couple of minutes all my mail re-appeared intact.

What worried me was that there was no indication that the rebuild was being done. No progress bar or spinning wheel, just an empty window. If I had been impatient I could easily have force quit the rebuild process thinking the application had crashed. That would have resulted in an Apple Mail restore to be sure.

On the Apple Website details are very basic. So, be patient, go for a walk and then come back and see if the rebuild worked.

You have heard of the myth about water behaving differently from the northern hemisphere compared to the southern hemisphere. Especially when draining water out of a sink or bath. Well apparently this is a myth and not fact.

So what has this got to do with hard drives? Well the same was said about some of the old Maxtor hard drives and why they were built with clockwise disc rotation. Where they built for the southern hemisphere market and do they work as well in the northern hemisphere. Built in mid 2000 the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 hard drives were designed to spin in the opposite direction to the conventional mechanical hard drives.

I could not find any information as to why they were built this way and whether this design did improve performance depending on location in the world. Maybe this question will never be answered.

See pictures below of a the internal working of a conventional hard drive compared to the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 hard drives.

Conventional WD Hard Drive

Conventional Anti Clockwise Disc

Maxtor DiamondMax Hard Drive

Now in a new 7mm slimline form factor, and Advanced Format specification, the HTS5450 hard drive is proving a popular choice for vendors with limited space. The drives are especially popular in Ultra thin laptops and slim portable external cases. Now being manufactured by Western Digital under the brand name of HGST, the 500GB boasts just a single media platter to store all that data. Part of the redesign also brings Advanced Format to these drives. Certain older operating systems such as Windows XP require the use of the HGST Align Tool provided by Western Digital. Users of the latest OS X systems and Windows 7+ do not require the use of this Tool.

Advanced Format has been introduced to cram more data on a single platter. To do this the manufacturer has increased the standard 512 byte sector size to a 4096 byte sector. This format design also incorporates better data integrity, hopefully giving the customer all round better performance and reliability.

Plenty of shops will sell you a “Mac Hard Drive” but there is no reason why you cannot use a windows format drive on a Mac. You just need to format it first. There was once a time when a drive was specially formatted by Apple to use on their Macs, but these days Apple use the same hard drives as everyone else. To use with the latest versions of OS X I would recommend following the steps below.

NOTE: Formatting your drive will destroy all the data. Make sure there’s nothing on there you need.

1. First attach the drive to your Mac. The Mac will notify you with a small finder window to initialise the drive. See below.

Initialize Your Drive For A Mac

2. Once you have clicked initialize you will see the Disk Utility Application window. See below.

Mac Disk Utility

3. You need to select the drive you want to format in the left hand window of the utility as highlighted in blue. Internal drives show as grey and external drives show as yellow. At this point make sure you choose the correct drive, the utility will not allow you to format the internal boot drive. See below.

Drive selected

4. Now choose the Partition Tab. See below.

Partition Tab

5. Now click on the Partition Layout drop down bar and choose the first option “1 Partition”. Also to the right under Partition Information give your drive a name and below that choose the partition type you want which will be Mac OS Extended ( journaled ). We are nearly there. You now need to click on the options tab in the bottom left of the utility window and choose GUID Partition Table and click okay. As you will read in the text information, this allows the drive to be used with all current OS X Macs. See Below.

Options Tab

7. Now all you need to do is click the apply button as shown in red below.

Apply

8. Another window will appear asking for confirmation to partition the drive. Click partition. See below.

Partition Drive

9. A formatting window with a progress bar will now appear and then disappear when done. You will now see your named drive in the left window, which means that your drive is now formatted. Close the disk utility and the hard drive is ready to use. See below.

Important Links

Advice

Stop using the hard drive as soon as possible. If the problem is getting worse then you may eventually lose access completely.

Don't download ANYTHING to the disk. It could write over the files you're trying to recover.

Don't try to scan, repair or fix any errors unless you have backups of the data. A failed repair process can damage the files beyond recovery.

Don't re-install or restore the computer unless you have backups of the data already. It may get the machine running again, but only in a factory-fresh way. Your data will be lost.

If you manage to access your files at any point, make a copy to another drive as soon as you can. It may be a fluke, and could be the last time you see the files. Don't reboot expecting to see them again.

If the files you need are really important then you should consider getting the disk professionally recovered. We've spent years making our process as safe as possible to maximise our chances of success.

If you decide to try your own recovery, keep a close watch on the time estimates. If the time keeps incrementing up it could be a sign of disk trouble. Failure to deal with that could cause the drive to fail completely, and beyond repair. A hard drive shouldn't take longer than a few hours to extract.